No Need for Doc-- ‘MDs’ Is DOA

ABC’s new “MDs” delivers early, with Dr. Robert Dalgety (John Hannah) having vibrating beeper sex (skip the details) with a female on the rooftop of Mission General Hospital in San Francisco, then leading rounds.

It epitomizes a lowbrow hour so terminally afflicted with cliches and bungled attempts to mingle comedy and syrupy drama that it pulls its own plug well before the premiere’s ending credits.

Its 10 p.m. hospital rival on CBS, the new “Presidio Med,” is a pill itself, but at least more watchable than this unpleasant number that follows the bittersweet escapades of Scottish Dalgety, the incoming general trauma surgeon, and Dr. Bruce Kellerman (William Fichtner), head of cardio-thoracic surgery.

With Dalgety and the biking Kellerman stamped as rule-breaking but caring renegades who get it together and come through brilliantly in the clutch, “MDs” is clearly going for “MASH’s” Hawkeye and Trapper John.

There’s a hint of Hot Lips in the tsk-tsking of the HMO-run hospital’s new administrator, Shelly Pangborn (Leslie Stefanson), who last ran an amusement park and faints at the sight of blood. And much more in Nurse Poole (Jane Lynch), a snide management fink who champions profits over patients.

As for “MDs” even approaching the dark, layered brilliance of “MASH,” however, lots of luck. The target here is a fat one that’s always available. Big medical institutions have been satirized as unwieldy, dehumanizing bureaucracies from “The Hospital,” a 1971 movie written by Paddy Chayefsky, to NBC’s funny second-season comedy “Scrubs.” But the hybridizing in “MDs”--Kellerman wisecracking one moment and appearing almost suicidal the next moment near where Dalgety had his beeper action, for example--is klutzy, the mixture of tones strident. And crises are resolved with smug, self-satisfied glibness.

After Dalgety and Kellerman ignore hospital policy to save a patient, naive new intern Maggie Yang (Michaela Conlin) sees them as gods and says: “You guys are really inspiring.” Only if the script says so.

“MDs” will be shown at 10 p.m. Wednesdays on ABC. The network has rated it TV-14DS (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for suggestive dialogue and sex).

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Howard Rosenberg can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com